1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to the field of financial advisory services. More particularly, the invention relates to a system for advising a user regarding feasible and optimal portfolio allocations among a set of available financial products and a user interface for such a system.
2. Description of the Related Art
During the 1980's, a significant trend emerged in retirement savings. Traditional defined benefit plan assets began shifting towards employee-directed defined contribution plans like 401(k). As this trend continues, many individual investors will ultimately become responsible for managing their own retirement investments. However, many people are not well-equipped to make informed investment decisions. Further, the number and diversity of investment options available to individuals is rapidly increasing, thereby making investment decisions more complex by the day.
Many investment software packages claim to help individuals plan for a secure retirement, or some other intermediate goal. However, typical prior art investment software packages are limited in several ways. For example, some packages provide generic asset-allocation suggestions (typically in the form of a pie-chart) and leave the investor to find the actual combination of financial products that meets the suggested asset allocation. However, many investments available to individual investors, such as mutual funds, cannot easily be categorized into any one generic asset class category. Rather, mutual funds are typically a mix of many different asset classes. This property of mutual funds complicates the selection of appropriate instruments to realize a desired asset allocation.
Further, some prior art programs, typically referred to as “retirement calculators,” require the user to provide estimates of future inflation, interest rates and the expected return on their investments. In this type of prior art system, the user is likely, and is in fact encouraged, to simply increase the expected investment returns until their desired portfolio value is achieved. As should be appreciated, one of the problems with this type of program is that the user is likely to create an unattainable portfolio based on an unrealistic set of future economic scenarios. That is, the portfolio of financial products required to achieve the X % growth per year in order to meet the user's retirement goal may not be available to the user. Further, the idealistic future economic conditions assumed by the user, for example, 0% inflation and 20% interest rates, may not be macroeconomically consistent. Typical prior art investment packages simply allow the user to manipulate economic conditions until a desired result is achieved rather than encouraging the user to focus on his/her own decisions regarding investment risk, savings rate, and retirement age within the context of realistic economic assumptions. Consequently, the so called “advice” rendered by many of the prior art investment software packages can be misleading and impossible to implement in practice.
In addition, investment advice software and their user interfaces in the prior art have various other disadvantages which are overcome by the present invention. Notably, prior art systems typically do not provide realistic estimates of the investment or retirement horizon risk-return tradeoff given a user's specific investments and financial circumstances. This makes informed judgments about the appropriate level of investment risk very difficult. The notion of a risk-return trade off is fundamental to modern portfolio theory, and any system which fails to convey long-term risk and return fails to provide information essential to making informed investment decisions.
In view of the foregoing, what is needed is a financial advisory system that employs advanced financial techniques to provide financial advice to individuals on how to reach specific financial goals, focuses individuals on the financial decisions they must make today, recommends one or more specific financial products given these decisions, and illustrates the chance that the financial decisions combined with the recommended financial products will meet their needs in the future. More specifically, it is desirable to provide a system that automatically generates future-looking realistic economic and investment return scenarios and allows a user to arrive at a feasible portfolio that meets both intermediate and long-term financial goals by a process of outcome-based risk profiling. In this manner, the user can focus on his/her own decisions regarding investment risk, savings, and retirement age while interactively observing the impact of those decisions on the range of possible investment outcomes. Further, it is desirable that the financial advisory system create a feasible optimal portfolio that maximizes the utility function of the user by selecting financial products that are available to the user and that provides the highest possible utility given the user's risk tolerance, investment horizon and savings level. By utility what is meant is a function that determines the relative preferences of an individual for different combinations of financial products based on one or more characteristics of the products (e.g., expected return, variance, etc.), and optionally one or more parameters specific to the individual. Moreover, it is advantageous to perform plan monitoring on an ongoing basis to alert the user if the likelihood of meeting their financial goals falls below a threshold value or if their portfolio risk level becomes inconsistent with their risk preferences. It is also desirable to provide specific advice to the user regarding steps they can take to improve their chances of meeting their financial goals while taking into consideration the user's personal tradeoffs among risk, savings, and retirement age.
Finally, it is also desirable to incorporate an intelligent user interface that communicates the fundamental risk-return tradeoffs to help individuals evaluate investment options. For example, it is desirable to provide a system that provides a visual indication representative of the probability of achieving a financial goal rather than a binary result. Also, it is advantageous to calibrate graphical input mechanisms so that the range of inputs allowable by these mechanisms are in fact feasible based upon available products. Additionally, to provide the user with the opportunity to make informed choices among an available set of financial products, it is desirable to present realistic estimates of risk based on projected outcomes associated with the specific recommended financial products. Importantly, because there is no one way that people look at risk, it is also desirable to present various notions of risk such as short-term risk, long-term risk, and the risk of not reaching a particular financial goal.